Wind Power

Extreme engineering is becoming the norm as offshore wind continues to scale up. Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built.

Wind energy is often thought of as "clean" but, in fact, the technology has the blood of thousands (if not millions) of bats on its hands. A new drone-mounted system shows promise in rerouting some bats above the turbine blades and away from danger.

Floating wind turbines are crucial to the future of offshore wind, but they require radically different thinking. French company Eolink is building a full-scale pyramid-style floating wind turbine that reduces materials and weight by more than 30%.

Aeromine says its unique "motionless" rooftop wind generators deliver up to 50% more energy than a solar array of the same price, while taking up just 10% of the roof space and operating more or less silently. In independent tests, they seem legit.

While wind energy systems can come in some pretty big forms, scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore have developed a small, low-cost device sensitive enough to capture energy from a light breeze.

A prototype wind turbine has recorded an extraordinary single-day renewable energy production total, bringing in a massive 359 megawatt-hours in a 24-hour time period. To get there, it had to operate over its rated capacity, essentially all day long.

As the shipping industry moves to decarbonize, huge sails could be making a comeback. The China Merchant Energy Shipping company (CMES) has taken delivery of a new supertanker, whose four large sails will cut down average fuel consumption by nearly 10%.

Swedish company SeaTwirl says its floating vertical-axis wind turbines have what it takes to dramatically reduce the cost of deep offshore wind energy, and it's signed a deal with Westcon to build and deploy a commercial-scale 1-MW turbine in Norway.

We interviewed the core team at Norway's World Wide Wind to learn more about its floating, tilting, contra-rotating, double turbine design, which it says can unlock unprecedented scale, power and density to radically lower the cost of offshore wind.

Norway's World Wide Wind has a radically different take on offshore wind power. These floating, vertical-axis wind turbines feature two sets of blades, tuned to contra-rotate – and they promise more than double the output of today's biggest turbines.

Through its massive wind turbines and innovative offshore designs, GE continues sharpening its toolkit in a bid to built the future of sustainable energy, and a newly unveiled turbine blade shows how that can extend to the materials used.

New renewable energy projects in the Gobi and other deserts will raise China's world-leading wind and solar capacity by a further 70 percent. Some 450 GW of new capacity will cement China as both the biggest and fastest-growing renewable energy generator.